Gregory White Smith, Pollock Biographer, Dies at 62

Gregory White Smith, a co-author of a 1990 biography of Jackson Pollock that won a Pulitzer Prize but also caused controversy for its assertions about his celebrated drip-painting technique, his sexual orientation and other matters, died on Thursday at his home in Aiken, S.C. He was 62.

The cause was a rare type of brain tumor, said his husband and co-author, Steven Naifeh.

Mr. Smith and Mr. Naifeh, who met at Harvard Law School in the 1970s, collaborated on more than a dozen books, including a well-received 2011 biography of Vincent van Gogh and “The Mormon Murders,” a 1988 account of a double murder in Salt Lake City. Both were best sellers.

They also wrote how-to guides, including “Moving Up in Style: The Successful Man’s Guide to Impeccable Taste,” “What Every Client Needs to Know About Using a Lawyer” and, with Michael Morgenstern, “How to Make Love to a Woman.”

Mr. Smith and Mr. Naifeh had said that their early commercial work gave them the financial resources to pursue their true passion, the Pollock biography. At 934 pages, “Jackson Pollock: An American Saga” was deeply researched and dense with new details about the painter’s life, family, friendships and relationship with his wife, the Abstract Expressionist painter Lee Krasner, who died in 1984.

But some critics were scathing in their appraisals, saying the book buried Pollock’s achievements under page after page about his personal life. They also criticized it for suggesting, without firm evidence, that Pollock had had homosexual relationships and for suggesting that one inspiration for his splattering style of painting was watching his father urinate when he was a boy.

“Mr. Naifeh and Mr. Smith know everything about Pollock and understand almost nothing,” the biographer and Pollock authority Elizabeth Frank wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1990. “Their book is bad biography because instead of offering a conception of Pollock rich enough to turn their facts into compelling truths, they cut him down to size, diminishing both the man and his art in an unending chronicle of self-destructive defeat and humiliation.”

After the book won the 1991 Pulitzer for biography, Francis V. O’Connor, a Pollock scholar, criticized the award in a Times article, noting that the movie rights to the book had been sold before it was published.

“One can only conclude that this award was made in something of an intellectual vacuum — or at least by people willing to accept primitive psychologizing and art chat as appropriate to scholarly discourse,” Mr. O’Connor wrote.

Mr. Naifeh and Mr. Smith fired back, picking at Mr. O’Connor’s own work and noting that their book had also been a finalist for the National Book Award.

“We wrote for a non-art-world audience as well as for an art-world audience, consciously rejecting the jargon and half-baked theories that fill a distressing number of books on contemporary art,” the men wrote in a response printed in The Times. “In so doing, we have hit Mr. O’Connor and his ilk where it hurts most. Their very identities are based on the conviction that they and only they are able to understand the mysteries of high art (to wit, Mr. O’Connor’s sad, parochial notion that the Pulitzer jury was fatally flawed because it did not include an art historian).”

The book also drew allegations of plagiarism from Jeffrey Potter, the author of “To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock” (1987). Mr. Naifeh and Mr. Smith sued Mr. Potter in response, though they later dropped the suit.

For a time the books were going to be the basis of two separate movies, but only one was made: “Pollock,” released in 2000, starring and directed by Ed Harris. It was produced by the company associated with the Naifeh-White book, but Mr. Potter served as an adviser, and Mr. Harris said that the Potter book was the foundation for his interest in Pollock.

Gregory White Smith was born on Oct. 4, 1951, in Ithaca, N.Y. He graduated from Colby College, in Maine, before earning his law degree and a master’s in education from Harvard.

He and Mr. Naifeh then lived in New York, where Mr. Smith worked briefly for a law firm before he took a job editing legal books. In the early 1980s, he and Mr. Naifeh published “The Best Lawyers in America,” the first in a series of guidebooks and rankings known as Best Lawyers Inc.

In addition to Mr. Naifeh, whom he married in 2011 in New York, Mr. Smith’s survivors include a sister, Linda Hirata.

In the 1970s, Mr. Smith learned he had a brain tumor called hemangiopericytoma. Since then he had sought innovative treatments that enabled him to defy a string of dire predictions about his prognosis. In 1997, he and Mr. Naifeh wrote about the experience in the book “Making Miracles Happen.”

In addition to their books — Mr. Naifeh did most of the reporting, while Mr. Smith did most of the writing — the couple also collaborated on the restoration of their 60-room mansion in Aiken, once owned by the Whitney family of New York. Their estate is the setting for Juilliard in Aiken, an annual series of concerts and educational programs produced with the Juilliard School.

Correction:

An obituary on April 14 about the author Gregory White Smith referred incorrectly to a 1991 article in The New York Times by the Jackson Pollock scholar Francis V. O’Connor about Mr. Smith and Steven Naifeh’s book “Jackson Pollock: An American Saga.” While Mr. O’Connor was highly critical of the book, it is not the case that he said Mr. Smith and Mr. Naifeh “were not traditionally credentialed art historians.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Gregory White Smith, 62, Pollock Biographer. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe